PUBLICATIONS
Female Entrepreneurship, Financial Frictions and Capital Misallocation in the US
(with Andrea Sy) @ Journal of Monetary Economics
Winner of the Young Economist Award from the European Economic Association and UniCredit Foundation in 2021
Heterogeneous Markups Cyclicality and Monetary Policy
(with Andrea Chiavari and Danila Smirnov) Conditionally Accepted @ International Economic Review
Female Entrepreneurship, Financial Frictions and Capital Misallocation in the US
(with Andrea Sy) @ Journal of Monetary Economics
Winner of the Young Economist Award from the European Economic Association and UniCredit Foundation in 2021
Heterogeneous Markups Cyclicality and Monetary Policy
(with Andrea Chiavari and Danila Smirnov) Conditionally Accepted @ International Economic Review
WORKING PAPERS
Student Debt and Entrepreneurship in the US R&R at AER
Policy makers and researchers are actively debating over the consequences of student debt for individuals' choices and aggregate quantities in the US. Using micro-level data and focusing on entrepreneurial outcomes, I document that having a student loan is associated with a lower likelihood of opening a firm and obtaining funding, and is linked to lower business size and revenues. To rationalize my findings, I build a heterogeneous agents model with education and entrepreneurial decisions, where student debt slows down the accumulation of wealth and reduces the collateral entrepreneurs can pledge to rent capital on financial markets. Calibrated to US data, my framework matches between 30 and 80% of the gaps in entrepreneurial margins across agents with and without college, and with or without loans. I also show that the increase in university prices and student debt from the 1980s to today accounts for a third of the decline in the entrepreneurial rate of college graduates with loans. As a validation exercise, I exploit the exogenous variation in the amount of individuals' outstanding debt induced by the 1998 reform to student loans bankruptcy. A regression discontinuity design pins down the elasticity of entrepreneurial entry to student debt that is then replicated in the model. Finally, I use my framework as a quantitative laboratory to study the effects of policy reforms, such as adopting income-driven repayment plans, raising college borrowing limits and expanding grants.
Special Mention at the 9th Edition of Econ JM Best Paper Award from the European Economic Association and UniCredit Foundation
Labor and Family Dynamics in a Joint-Search Framework (with Danila Smirnov). R&R at JPE Macro - 2nd round
We develop a novel search theory of the labor and marriage markets that accounts for the interplay between employment and family dynamics. In our heterogeneous agents model, individuals search and lose jobs, accumulate and deplete productivity, and undergo a two-sided matching process to form couples, which increases the likelihood of realized fertility. By endogenizing household formation, we show that agents' sorting and selection into couples determine labor productivity differences across the samples of married and single individuals. In addition, sharing family income can insure households from productivity shocks and unemployment risk. Only when considered together, these mechanisms replicate the differences in labor market outcomes by marital status documented in the US, explaining 75% of the wage marital premium and 50% of the unemployment marital gap. Finally, we use the model as a laboratory to study optimal unemployment insurance schemes for single and joint-households.
Sorting into Entrepreneurial Teams (with Edoardo Acabbi, Andrea Alati and Luca Mazzone). Submitted.
This paper studies how entrepreneurs sort into founding teams and how team composition shapes the equilibrium distribution of firms. We develop a theory of career choice and team formation in which skill complementarities make team entrepreneurship attractive for agents with unbalanced skill profiles, while talent similarity makes teaming preferable to other outside options. Using matched employer-employee and balance-sheet data from Portugal, we show that teams combining similar talent with diverse specializations create larger, more productive, and longer-lived firms. We also document a bias in meetings toward similarly-skilled founders and calibrate the model to match this evidence. Meeting bias lowers average wages and output by 12% and 13% respectively by distributing activity towards a higher number of less productive firms, while search frictions per se reduce wages and aggregate output by 15% and 13% respectively by preventing highly diverse but specialized individuals from forming successful teams.
Is Knowledge Enough? Financial Literacy, Marriage, and Gender Differences in Wealth (with Marta Cota, Maria Frech and Michael Tallent). Submitted.
This paper studies whether financial literacy shapes gender differences in wealth. Using data from the United States and the Netherlands, we document that women have lower financial literacy and confidence than men, are less likely to manage long-term investments within their households, and hold fewer financial assets, with the largest gaps among married agents. We build a life-cycle portfolio-choice model with endogenous financial literacy accumulation and marital dynamics centered around two wedges: a higher cost of literacy investment for married women and gender-specific perceived returns on risky assets. The calibrated model qualitatively matches untargeted life-cycle patterns in literacy and portfolio choice, accounting for a third of the gender gap in individual financial assets. Counterfactual exercises show that early-life financial education can narrow the gender knowledge gap, and portfolio-allocation rules may offset confidence and marriage-related wedges that education may not undo, lowering the wealth gap by 6%.
Student Debt and Entrepreneurship in the US R&R at AER
Policy makers and researchers are actively debating over the consequences of student debt for individuals' choices and aggregate quantities in the US. Using micro-level data and focusing on entrepreneurial outcomes, I document that having a student loan is associated with a lower likelihood of opening a firm and obtaining funding, and is linked to lower business size and revenues. To rationalize my findings, I build a heterogeneous agents model with education and entrepreneurial decisions, where student debt slows down the accumulation of wealth and reduces the collateral entrepreneurs can pledge to rent capital on financial markets. Calibrated to US data, my framework matches between 30 and 80% of the gaps in entrepreneurial margins across agents with and without college, and with or without loans. I also show that the increase in university prices and student debt from the 1980s to today accounts for a third of the decline in the entrepreneurial rate of college graduates with loans. As a validation exercise, I exploit the exogenous variation in the amount of individuals' outstanding debt induced by the 1998 reform to student loans bankruptcy. A regression discontinuity design pins down the elasticity of entrepreneurial entry to student debt that is then replicated in the model. Finally, I use my framework as a quantitative laboratory to study the effects of policy reforms, such as adopting income-driven repayment plans, raising college borrowing limits and expanding grants.
Special Mention at the 9th Edition of Econ JM Best Paper Award from the European Economic Association and UniCredit Foundation
Labor and Family Dynamics in a Joint-Search Framework (with Danila Smirnov). R&R at JPE Macro - 2nd round
We develop a novel search theory of the labor and marriage markets that accounts for the interplay between employment and family dynamics. In our heterogeneous agents model, individuals search and lose jobs, accumulate and deplete productivity, and undergo a two-sided matching process to form couples, which increases the likelihood of realized fertility. By endogenizing household formation, we show that agents' sorting and selection into couples determine labor productivity differences across the samples of married and single individuals. In addition, sharing family income can insure households from productivity shocks and unemployment risk. Only when considered together, these mechanisms replicate the differences in labor market outcomes by marital status documented in the US, explaining 75% of the wage marital premium and 50% of the unemployment marital gap. Finally, we use the model as a laboratory to study optimal unemployment insurance schemes for single and joint-households.
Sorting into Entrepreneurial Teams (with Edoardo Acabbi, Andrea Alati and Luca Mazzone). Submitted.
This paper studies how entrepreneurs sort into founding teams and how team composition shapes the equilibrium distribution of firms. We develop a theory of career choice and team formation in which skill complementarities make team entrepreneurship attractive for agents with unbalanced skill profiles, while talent similarity makes teaming preferable to other outside options. Using matched employer-employee and balance-sheet data from Portugal, we show that teams combining similar talent with diverse specializations create larger, more productive, and longer-lived firms. We also document a bias in meetings toward similarly-skilled founders and calibrate the model to match this evidence. Meeting bias lowers average wages and output by 12% and 13% respectively by distributing activity towards a higher number of less productive firms, while search frictions per se reduce wages and aggregate output by 15% and 13% respectively by preventing highly diverse but specialized individuals from forming successful teams.
Is Knowledge Enough? Financial Literacy, Marriage, and Gender Differences in Wealth (with Marta Cota, Maria Frech and Michael Tallent). Submitted.
This paper studies whether financial literacy shapes gender differences in wealth. Using data from the United States and the Netherlands, we document that women have lower financial literacy and confidence than men, are less likely to manage long-term investments within their households, and hold fewer financial assets, with the largest gaps among married agents. We build a life-cycle portfolio-choice model with endogenous financial literacy accumulation and marital dynamics centered around two wedges: a higher cost of literacy investment for married women and gender-specific perceived returns on risky assets. The calibrated model qualitatively matches untargeted life-cycle patterns in literacy and portfolio choice, accounting for a third of the gender gap in individual financial assets. Counterfactual exercises show that early-life financial education can narrow the gender knowledge gap, and portfolio-allocation rules may offset confidence and marriage-related wedges that education may not undo, lowering the wealth gap by 6%.
WORK IN PROGRESS
No Country for Young Managers: Relational Capital and the Distribution of Italian Firms (with Luca Citino, Stefano Pietrosanti and Guido Spanò)
We study how credit is allocated over the managerial life-cycle and its aggregate consequences. Using matched Italian administrative records on firm balance sheets, top managers, and credit outcomes, we document significant age- and tenure-based credit gradients: younger and less-tenured entrepreneurs obtain less credit and face higher denial risk, despite higher average revenue product of capital. We develop a general-equilibrium heterogeneous agent model with occupational choices in which firms' borrowing capacity evolves with managerial age and within-firm tenure. The model matches the empirical life-cycle patterns in credit and capital productivity, and implies sizeable misallocation through constrained entry and expansion of high-productivity young entrepreneurs. Counterfactuals reveal that broad collateral easing and targeted flattening of age-based collateral generate output and welfare gains, whereas flattening tenure-based collateral yields smaller gains and higher inequality. Policy exercises show that fiscal subsidies and user-cost relief on capital to young entrepreneurs at entry can deliver aggregate gains, while public-guaranteed collateral is welfare-improving when eligibility extends to their first few entrepreneurial years, despite a materially higher fiscal cost.
Suited for the Job: Knowledge Mismatch in Higher Education (with Alejandro Rabano and Ante Sterc)
Digital technologies and the transition to a low-carbon economy are reallocating labor demand across types of knowledge. In this context, we analyze the supply of university fields of study and their effects on welfare and wage inequality. We provide micro-level evidence from Spain on university graduates. We show that field choices reflect both tastes and expected wages, and that labor market returns depend on the match between graduates' field of study and the knowledge required in their occupations. Also, universities do not systematically adjust their seats to labor market trends. We develop a general equilibrium model where students choose fields, universities supply slots across studies and firms demand field-specific knowledge. After calibrating the model to Spain, we explore the aggregate effects of increasing labor demand for digital and green jobs. While wages rise heterogeneously across fields of study, we find that both shocks increase wage inequality.
Choosing Demand (with Lukas Nord and Federico Pessina)
We document that the conditional distribution of profit rates is flat along the size distribution of firms in Portuguese administrative data. While many small and profitable firms remain persistently small and profitable years after entry, their profitability is positively associated with indicators of specialization in the product market. We suggest that the presence of small but profitable firms can be rationalized by demand-side heterogeneity, with firms choosing whether to produce in a mass or niche market. We formalize this mechanism in a firm dynamics model with search in the product market and firm-specific dispersion in consumer preferences.
